Marketing Insights on a Key Instagram Demographic

Instagram commissioned a study to analyze how moms use its service, presumably to help advertisers plan their Mother's Day campaigns.

It found not only that moms are active on Instagram in general, but one in four women over 18 on the platform in the U.S. are moms. Of this group, 93% use Instagram at least once a week. 68% use it daily.

"With their hectic schedules, moms are using mobile devices to manage their entire lives—from work to personal," the company says. "In addition to managing their schedules, the average mom checks social media 15 times a day and checks Instagram six times every day."

"Moms follow content based on their interests," it says. "Looking at internal data, we discovered that moms are 5x more likely to follow accounts about cosmetics, 3x more likely to follow fashion, 2x more likely to follow hair accounts and 1.7x more likely to follow animal accounts when compared to dads."

Over half of moms on Instagram follow businesses, the company says. 56% say Instagram is where they learn about products, and 78% of moms take action from business posts after seeing content on Instagram, according to the company.

In the U.S., ads shared from department stores convert 2.8x more often among moms, and with retail, apparel and accessories ads, moms convert 2.1x more often, it says.

For what it's worth, Father's Day isn't really that far away either, and Instagram says dads are just as active with nearly half of them following businesses and 69% of those taking action from the content they see. Dads are 4.3x more likely to follow auto brands and 2.5x more likely to follow "leisure" accounts.

What are you supposed to do with all of this info? Adjust your targeting, of course. Mothers, New Moms, Dads, Fit Moms, Moms of Grade Schooler Kids, etc. are all available segments for Instagram ads. In a blog post, Instgram shares some examples of effective campaigns from Campbell's and GapKids.

There's been a lot happening with Instagram in the news this week. Rumors that its new algorithmic feed would go into effect this past Tuesday emerged, though the company said it was still a ways off (you may want to consider this in advance). The company also announced that sixty-second videos are on the way, and they've updated the overlay that appears on ads.

Instagram recently announced it surpassed 200,000 advertisers. Mother's Day is on May 8th. Here's a helpful infographic from WebpageFX that shows Facebook and Instagram ad specs for 10 different objectives.